


Tea and Conspurracy

by LookingForDroids



Category: Hiveswap
Genre: F/F, Ficlet, First Meetings, POV Second Person, Secret Agent Courtship, a little light murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:01:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26861803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: Word on the dark web says she deals in information, assassination, relationship advice, and meowbeast memes.
Relationships: Polypa Goezee/Boldir Lamati
Comments: 13
Kudos: 17





	Tea and Conspurracy

Your contact meets you in a quiet little tea shop and purrbeast cafe on the outskirts of one of the richer midblood districts. Word on the dark web says she deals in information, assassination, relationship advice, and meowbeast memes. You’re here for the first. You don’t anticipate ever needing the third, and you have your own sources for the fourth. The second is strictly a last resort.

Others are not nearly so scrupulous in their ethics, and so you sit with your back to the wall, scanning the corners and idly petting a fluffy tabby kitten while you pretend to flip through a menu. You’ve run the numbers, and having a purrbeast on your lap is a surprisingly effective deterrent to assassination in an establishment heavily frequented by olives. Not infallible, but nothing is, and every small choice matters. You wait.

At thirteen after four, a girl who doesn’t work here emerges from the kitchen carrying a tray laden with scalding leaf water and a cheerfully-painted set of scalding leaf water accoutrements. She’s wearing a waitress’s uniform with a Taurra sign beneath her collar and bronze blush highlights on her cheeks, and she greets you with a smile that brings to mind moonlight on the ocean’s surface: brilliant, reflected, obscuring the threats below. You study her face as she arranges your table and pours you a cup of some unfamiliar floral blend, and you can’t find the places where her illusion falls apart, but you recognize her anyway. It isn’t often that you find someone else who understands the nature of depths and surfaces, and that’s a thought more dangerous than any smile.

You slip the USB she’d hidden under your napkin into your coat, but you leave the leaf water she brought you alone. As good as it smells, the only thing you’ve been able to discover of her loyalties is that she doesn’t appear to have them, and you’re not stupid. You sip your preferred blend from your own thermal flask instead, dark and bitter and caffeinated, and occupy yourself with working out the connections between the unchosen words in tonight’s synonym grid as you watch the events in the cafe develop as they will. The bronze waitress disappears into the ablutionblock after she’s done at your mealplane, and doesn’t re-emerge, but a few minutes later, a tired-looking girl hefting a messenger bag over one shoulder slouches her way out the door. She’s got cerulean highlights in her hair, a smear of ink on one cheek and a pen stuck absently through her ponytail. On her way past your table, she reaches down to skritch your kitten between the ears, and a note falls from her sleeve.

_This place is under surveillance * leave quickly * don’t look back *|_

Quickly is not immediately, and it won’t do to let your observers draw too many connections. You take another drink from your thermal flask and fill in a few correct answers on your synonym grid, then rise, holding the taste of cooling leaf water on your tongue as you step back into the heat and noise of the city. On your way out, there’s a scream from behind you, short and sharp, of the kind that might be caused by a pen stuck absently through someone’s eye. You don’t linger. It’s difficult to say whether you got caught in her business or she got caught in yours, but you take the long and twisty way back to your current safehive, checking for signs of reflected pursuit in windows and puddles as you go. It’s a long time before you can be confident you’re clear.

Her information is good, though – a file with more than you’ve ever been able to gather on the encrypted transmissions of drones, both predictable and irregular. You won’t ask her to share her sources, any more than you’d volunteer to give up your own, but you’re impressed, even if her services are too costly to purchase lightly.

A few nights pass before the eddies of causality are clear enough for you to consider venturing outside your safehive, and by the time you do, the weather has changed in large ways and small. It’s late in the dim season, and small white flowers are blooming in the shrubbery along the road, filling the storm-heavy air with their scent. You pluck one as you walk, trying to think of what it reminds you of. Garden paths, you decide, forking and recursive. A cup of tea left to cool untouched.

You don’t think about the route you take, just let your strut pods choose the way. It isn’t random, but you’re interested in where the illusion of chance might take you. Down bright-lit streets, tonight, along the path of an underground river, past clubs and cinemas and an outdoor cafe where a goldblood girl sits, holding a steaming mug and reading a slim volume of manga. She’s got circuit board jewelry woven into her braids, and you might have walked on without recognition, but – there’s a tabby kitten on her lap, calmly licking what looks like blood from one paw, and you wonder about small decisions. If it was your business, she didn’t have to step in. If it was hers, she didn’t have to warn you. She doesn’t look up, but you know she knows you’re there.

As you pass, you slip your flower underneath her napkin.


End file.
